Tuesday, August 25, 2015

New Orleans, Ten Years After Hurricane Katrina

Destroyed homes in the Lower Ninth Ward.

August 29 is the tenth
anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In 2008, three years after the disaster, I
was part of a Mennonite Disaster Service work team from River East MB Church in
Winnipeg that went to New Orleans to help repair homes in that city. I wrote
the following article about that experience for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Bourbon Street was rocking, the bars and clubs filled
with people enjoying one of New
Orleans' most popular tourist spots. A cacaphony of
jazz, blues, rock and country filled the narrow balcony-lined avenue,
giving the area a bright and festive air.

Almost three
years after Hurricane Katrina, the city is back in business--as far as tourism
is concerned.

Marks on the house indicate it has been searched, and if bodies were found inside.

But down in the city's lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly neighbourhood, where
Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) is rebuilding houses damaged or destroyed by the
devastating storm, it was a different story.

The only sounds
there were that of hammers and saws as volunteers from Winnipeg's River East Mennonite Brethren
church toiled in the heat to frame, drywall, tile and finish houses for
residents anxious to return to their homes.

"I know that tourism is the lifeblood of this city," says Robert
Green, 53, an accountant who lost his home, mother and a granddaughter to the
flood that followed the storm.

"People see
places like Bourbon Street
and the French Quarter and they think the city is healed. But there's still a
lot to do in this city to help the residents."

Inside an abandoned home.

Almost three years after the storm, there's still lots to do in New Orleans.

Green's
once-vibrant Ninth Ward community is mostly a collection of empty lots and a
few abandoned houses—the whole neighbourhood was swept away by the wall of
water that broke through the IndustrialCanal levee a few hundred
yards behind his house.

In other sections, house after house is boarded up, the owners still trying to
decide whether to move back and rebuild. It's the same for businesses; a drive
through the hardest-hit areas reveals empty and abandoned banks, hotels, restaurants,
grocery stores, strip malls, department stores and gas stations.

It is hard to comprehend the scope of the disaster. Eighty percent of the city
was submerged and destroyed and 9,368 businesses were closed or moved. Over700,000 peoplewere acutely impacted, with many
forced to evacuate for safety to cities across the U.S.

"It wasn't a disaster—it was a catastrophe," says Steve Zimmer, Vice
President for Community Mobilization for the United Way of New Orleans.

According to Zimmer, who supervises the hurricane recovery efforts for that
agency, no city in the U.S.
has ever experienced destruction this severe.

"There is no modern model for what has happened to New Orleans," he says, noting that in a
normal disaster, it usually takes two to three years for a community to
recover.

"This one
will take 11 to 15 years. We've got to blow up the old models and start
thinking in new and different ways."

Houses gone, almost as far as you can see.

In a normal disaster, the goal is to get people back to "where they
were" before it happened, Zimmer says.

"But that's
not possible here, where a whole neighbourhood was destroyed," he says.

"People didn't just lose their homes, they lost their community--the
grocery store, their church, the library, the school, bank and the usual
services."

Adding to the challenge of the recovery has been the at-times ineffectual and
uncoordinated response from various levels of government.

"Our government failed us," says Zimmer. "There was colossal
failure at the core."

Despite the problems, things are slowly improving.

Figures vary, with reports
indicating that between 67 percent and 87 percent of residents have returned,
and people in the city are beginning to move out of trailers and back into
houses. School enrolment is increasing, and 6,368 businesses have started back
up.

But down in the parts of the city hardest-hit by the storm, attention is
focused on much the smaller details of repair and reconstruction. For
residents, the sounds of rebuilding is the sound of hope.

"After I saw what the storm had done to my house, I cried a lot,"
says Catalina Blosseau, who lives with her disabled husband and daughter in a
small trailer.

"I wondered
if there was anyone who could help me. I was losing hope."

Blosseau sought help from Helping Hands, the disaster recovery arm of Catholic
Charities. After reviewing her case, the agency asked MDS to supply volunteers
to rebuild her home. On August 7 she'll move in.

"Now I am so happy," she says of the work of the MDS volunteers.
"I got my life back again."

When it comes to helping New Orleans
get back on its feet, volunteers are a huge part of the story.

"Without volunteers, we wouldn't be as far along as we are," says
Paul Cook, Senior Project Manager for Helping Hands. "We really have been
blessed."

"If it weren't for the volunteers, sometimes I think nothing would be
getting done at all," adds Zimmer.

MDS volunteers from Winnipeg building a new house.

Nobody knows how many volunteers have come to New Orleans to help; one estimate puts the
number at about one million. Of that total, about 16,000 have volunteered with
Helping Hands, while 1,160 have done reconstruction work with MDS.

But progress is frustratingly slow.

"It's a slow and tedious process," says Cook, who spent 25 years in
the construction business.

"Even in
the best of times it can take four to six months to gut and repair a house. Add
in the lack of services and the large demand on trades, and you see why this
takes so much longer."

It doesn't help that getting funds and loans from the state is an arduous
experience for many.

"There's a
lot of red tape," Cook says, adding that it can also take time to
process insurance claims, and that the amount provided by insurers often is
insufficient to cover the damage.

"We don't
have a lot of money to donate to make up the shortfall, but we do what we can,"
he says.

Adding to the problem is what he calls the "second wave" of people
needing help because contractors they hired to repair their homes did shoddy
work, failed to complete the work, failed to comply with local building
codes--or simply ripped them off.

"Unfortunately, this kind of thing was not uncommon," he says, noting
that his agency recently assigned MDS volunteers to re-gut and re-build a home
that had been repaired incorrectly.

But those issues aren't the main concern for the volunteers from Winnipeg—they
just wanted to do as much as they could in the week they were in New Orleans to
help a few families. And their work is appreciated.

"We like working with MDS," says Cook. "They're very good at
everything."

"MDS has been a wonderful partner," adds Zimmer. "I'm really
impressed by the people they bring down here."

For Robert Green, the presence of so many volunteers in his neighbourhood has a
more personal effect.

"So many people from around the world have responded to our need," he
says. "It helps me get over the anguish I feel over the loss of my mother
and granddaughter. It’s made it possible for me to move on.”

A hope still being realized.

Today New Orleans is well on its way back from the
hurricane, but there’s still a ways to go, especially in the poorer areas of
the city. MDS finished its work in the Gulf Coast in 2012; over 17,000 volunteers worked 126,400 days at 194 cleanup sites, rebuilding
122 homes.

Click here to read a thank-you editorial from the New Orleans Times-Picayune to all those who
came to the city to volunteer with the recovery effort.